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The use of Meeting Maker is finally coming to an end at work.  We’re moving over to a Microsoft Exchange server.

Personally, I prefer to just have all my calendars (personal, work, and studio) in one application, and on my Mac, so I worked to export the mm entries and import them into iCal.

Which turned out to be a pain in the ass.

MeetingMaker has a “export to icalendar” option, but I found that it didn’t work all the time.  It would run, and then die.  Apparently, it’s a problem with recurring meetings.

So I exported my entire Meeting Maker calendar as text, and used an automator script that I found to converted Meeting Maker to iCal.

I watched as it nicely imported years of data into iCal, including the recurring items, attendees, and notes.

I found another program that removed any duplicate entries, and ran that (had some duplicates due to Palm mishaps from years ago).

So now, everything is in iCal.

Thought I’d share these tips and scripts with everyone else.

HowTo perform a mySQL search and replace

Here are the steps required to perform a mySQL search and replace. This allows for very fast updating of database fields.

First, login as root and enter mysql

[root@e-smith /root]# mysql

Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 2 to server version: 3.23.32

Type ‘help;’ or ‘\h’ for help. Type ‘\c’ to clear the buffer

Next load the database you wish to use, syntax is:
use database_name;

mysql> use mydatabase;
Reading table information for completion of table and column names
You can turn off this feature to get a quicker startup with -A

Database changed

Finally run the command line below to perform the search and replace, syntax is:
update tablename set field = replace(field,’search_for_this’,'replace_with_this’);

mysql> update table_name set field = replace(field,’(‘,”);
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.08 sec)
Rows matched: 450 Changed: 387 Warnings: 0

When completed, exit mysql

mysql> exit
Example:

Let’s say you have a database named address_book with a table named contact_list and a field name phone_number. Some of your phone numbers were entered as (areacode) number and you wish to remove the () from areacode. Here is what you would do:

[root@e-smith /root]# mysql

Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 2 to server version: 3.23.32

Type ‘help;’ or ‘\h’ for help. Type ‘\c’ to clear the buffer

mysql> use address_book;
Reading table information for completion of table and column names
You can turn off this feature to get a quicker startup with -A

Database changed

mysql> update contact_list set phone_number = replace(phone_number,’(‘,”);
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.08 sec)
Rows matched: 450 Changed: 387 Warnings: 0

mysql> update contact_list set phone_number = replace(phone_number,’)',”);
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.08 sec)
Rows matched: 450 Changed: 387 Warnings: 0

mysql> exit